The verdict of more than a dozen readers expressed here on Amazon is correct: Timothy Schaffert's "The Coffins of Little Hope" is smart, funny, sad, and magical.
The book's intelligence, its melancholy, its subtle, down-home humor, and its manifold charms, are exhibited in many forms. There's the unsentimental depiction of small rebellions in a small town in Nebraska, where "everything falls apart." There's a page-turning mystery about the fate of a missing 11-year-old girl named Lenore (yes, an allusion to Poe) who may or may not be real. There's a clever subplot involving the secret publication of the final volume of a best-selling series of Young Adult novels whose plucky protagonists have captivated many in the community. There's a light, fairy tale dusting that covers the town and its inhabitants, causing a spell that gently dislocates the reader's sense of what exactly is going on. There is, front and center, the rueful yet wise voice of the novel's 83-year-old narrator, Essie, matriarch of the town's newspaper and writer of its obituaries. Her spirit, simultaneously sinking ("I've come grim-reaping") and unsinkable ("I'm happy to be sad"), dominates the book.
Let me add two observations to the accumulating praise:
The first is to note the rare quality of the narrator's voice. In contemporary fiction the outlook of youth or middle-age predominates, and so it is refreshing to come across a successful novel grounded in the perspective of old age. Over the course of what Essie calls her year of "minor havoc," the two people she holds most dear -- her 38-year-old grandson, Doc, and her 14-year old great-granddaughter, Tiff -- grow and change. But Essie remains, steadfastly, Essie. This means the book traces the slow unfolding of her essential self, contradictions and all.
Essie combines the wisdom of age with a writer's appreciation for how contradictory terms often appear in conjunction. It is through Essie that Schaffert makes sport of this oxymoron called life. Not a page goes by without some remark about incongruities, pluses and minuses, the unavoidable either/or, of living. Essie sees a man's "gruff demeanor, which disguised his sweet, soft heart." She observes how middle age has rendered Lenore's mother "wasted and lovely both." It frustrates her to realize that "now a parent can be doing the wrong thing even when she's doing the right thing." She spies a man "strumming an unplugged electric guitar." At a funeral of an old friend, while sitting with her remaining pals, she confesses, "we were nearly moved to tears by our own lack of emotion."
So here's a test: if you grow bored around the elderly when they start in talking about their philosophy of life, steer clear of "Coffins". If, on the other hand, you had a grandmother who stood her ground, spoke her mind and remained sharp to the end (and you miss her), then I think you'll get hooked by this book.
For me, the second notable aspect of "The Coffins of Little Hope" is how much it is about family. Essie begins Chapter 8 with a chart of her family tree. She is obliged to label it, "Little Family Tree," since it has been reduced to only four living members. The most poignant relationship in the book is the loving bond between Essie and Tiff (though we are aware of the gap of seven decades between them). At times I was reminded of the sundered, incomplete families found in the novels of John Irving and Anne Tyler. And there are other echoes the Baltimore-based Tyler in Schaffert's treatment of Essie's Midwestern family, whose members come to learn, well, you can't live with them, and you can't live without them.
But Schaffert is his own man. Throughout this novel he displays an easy wit and imagination, conveyed in an engaging writing style. This guy is good and this book is a delight.
